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Chapter 25: From Words to Pure Sounds to Being

13. Devi, imagine the Sanskrit letters in these honey-filled foci of awareness, first as letters, then more subtly as sounds, then as most subtle feeling. Then, leaving them aside, be free.

14. Bathe in the center of sound, as in the continuous sound of a waterfall. Or, by putting the fingers in the ears, hear the sound of sounds.

Jean Paul Sartre wrote an autobiography. He has called it words. The name is very meaningful. It is the autobiography of every man - words and words and words. You are filled with words, and this process of words continues the whole day, even in the mind. When you are sleeping, you are still filled with words, thoughts.

The mind is just an accumulation of words, and everyone is too much obsessed with the mind. That is why self-knowledge becomes more and more impossible. The self is beyond the words, or behind the words, or below the words, or above the words, but never in the words. You exist not in the mind, but just below the mind, behind the mind, above the mind - never in the mind. You are focused in the mind, but you are not there. Standing out, you are focused in the mind. Because of this constant focusing, you have become identified with the mind. You think you are the mind, this is the only problem, the basic problem, and unless you are aware that you are not the mind, nothing meaningful can happen to you. You will live in misery.

This identification is the misery. It is as if one is identified with a shadow. Then the whole life becomes false. Your whole life is false, and the basic error is that you are identified with the mind. You think you are the mind: this is the ignorance. You can develop your mind, but in that way ignorance will not be dissolved. You can become very intelligent, you can become very talented, you may even become a genius. But if the identification with the mind is there, you remain basically mediocre because you remain identified with a false shadow. How does it happen? Unless you understand the mechanism of how it happens you cannot go beyond it, and all the techniques of meditation are nothing but processes to go beyond, to go beyond the mind.

Meditation techniques are not against the world, they are against the mind - and not really against the mind, but against identification. How are you identified with the mind? What is the mechanism that is working? Mind is a need - a great need, particularly for humanity. And that is the basic difference between man and the animals. Man thinks, and he has used thinking as a weapon for his struggle to survive. He could survive because he could think; otherwise he is more helpless than any animal, more weak than any animal. Physically, it was impossible for him to survive. He could survive because he could think. Because of thinking, he has become the master of the earth.